Richard Brautigan was another member of the Beat scene of San Francisco in the fifties and is often considered a bridge between the decades. He became, with the publication of Trout Fishing in America, one of the most popular of the counterculture writers of the sixties. He is often thought of as a modern Thoreau; his love of nature and his concern for the environment are recurring themes in his works—in one sequence he writes of sections of a trout stream being sold in a junkyard for $6.50 per foot. Written in 1961, Trout Fishing in America was finally published by the small Four Seasons Foundation in 1967, and was so popular that many of the communes that sprang up around the country were named after the novel. Thousands of copies of Trout Fishing in America were ordered for sporting goods stores in the mistaken belief that the book was about the subtle art of angling. Richard Brautigan died in 1984, an apparent suicide.
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